George W. Bush on Civil Liberties

The Bush administration's "global gag rule" prohibits overseas organizations receiving federal funds from advocating for abortion rights, performing abortions, or providing abortion referral services. Under Bush, the FDA artificially delayed approval of Plan B (misoprostol) for over-the-counter use by more than two years. The Bush administration has consistently promoted abstinence-only education rather than comprehensive sex education.

Bush presided over 155 executions during his term as Texas governor, the most of any governor since the death penalty's reinstatement in 1976. As president, however, he does not stand out on this issue. His administration has not expanded the conditions under which the death penalty may be sought, nor has it pursued a conspicuously high number of federal capital cases.

Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill in 2002, and supported a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration (though it never passed). He established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which has awarded billions in federal funds to religious charities. All post-9/11 federal law enforcement civil liberties abuses have technically occurred under the auspices of the Bush administration.

Unlike most Republicans, President Bush has supported a citizenship path for undocumented immigrants as well as guest worker programs. He has stated on more than one occasion that mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is not a viable option, and backed a bipartisan immigration reform bill in early 2007. While he has increased enforcement of existing anti-immigrant ordinances, his opposition to punitive federal anti-immigrant proposals in 2005 and 2006 may have blocked their passage.

Although President Bush strongly advocated a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage at the federal level, it has never passed. Bush has made no attempt to rescind President Clinton's Executive Order 13087, banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in federal employment. Bush opposed a 2007 bill that would have federalized hate crime investigations while adding sexual orientation to the list of hate crime categories, but his stated rationale had to do with the federalization of hate crimes, not the addition of sexual orientation as a protected category.

President Bush has appointed the first non-white attorney general and both the first and second non-white secretaries of state, but these visible achievements do not negate other problems with his administration's civil rights policies. Bush was elected to his first term in November 2000 under the shadow of minority voter disenfranchisement in Florida, where he won the state and the election by 537 votes; he has done little to address these concerns. His social policy reforms also tend to financially benefit white Americans, and post-9/11 law enforcement policies have sometimes involved ethnic profiling.

President Bush actually has a relatively weak platform on gun rights for a Republican, but this has been well disguised by the vigilance of the Republican Congress. Bush supported the Clinton assault weapons ban while campaigning in 2000, for example--but because the Republican Congress never passed a bill to renew it, it expired anyway. To his credit, Bush did sign a 2006 bill banning unconstitutional confiscation of legally owned firearms, as had occurred in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

President Bush appointed Chief Justice John Roberts to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Associate Justice Samuel Alito to replace Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. While the cases of the 2006-2007 term are often described as representing a stark shift to the right, most of the rulings represent incremental changes in interpretation and may or may not be indicative of a broader trajectory. Read more...

The Bush administration more or less invented the term "War on Terror," and the civil liberties abuses that have come along with it. These policies have permanently scarred the legacy of what might otherwise have been a relatively centrist and non-threatening presidency. Read more...

"In 30 years," Garrison Keillor wrote in a 2007 op-ed, "a few historians will come along to say that {President Bush} was better than a lot of people thought. For our sake, I sure hope they're right."

President Bush's term isn't over yet, but it might not be a bad idea to take some of the recent worst-president-ever talk and apply a little history to it. The worst president ever, from the standpoint of civil liberties, would almost certainly have been Woodrow Wilson. (Here's why.) President Bush is not the first president, or even the first recent president, to sign off on torture, warrantless surveillance, illegal monitoring of opposition groups, ethnic and religious profiling, mass arrest and detention of perceived "foreign radicals," and so on and so forth. This is not to say that President Bush is good; this is to say that presidents, in general, tend to be very bad and do not receive the scrutiny that they deserve. The post-9/11 abuses were just far enough beyond our threshold to attract the attention of the press, but every president would have benefited from that sort of attention.

Never trust the president, no matter who the president is. This cardinal rule of government was central to the Founding Fathers' thinking when they drafted the Constitution, but even they lived to see George Washington transformed into demigod status by biographers. Never trust the president. This is what Americans learned after Watergate, and it is the lesson we as Americans should be learning now. Never trust the president. It is a lesson that the next administration will teach us, just as this one has.